A little bit more on Darkfall Online

Sorry about the lack of updates again, there’s a lot of stuff I want to write about, but I haven’t really gotten to it yet. Instead I’ll give you a link to the latest Dev Journal of Darkfall Online. Again no release-dates or beta-info, but it’s the best journal of them I’ve read so far.

“More than anything else, Darkfall is selling full freedom gameplay. The game and the technology have been designed and implemented from the ground up for to be a full sandbox PvP game. When we were talking about this concept and about full PvP, about a dark and realistic world, about blood splatter, decapitation etc. a few years ago, everyone else was playing it safe and using terms like “Quakefest” and “dudefest” to describe our concept while simultaneously discounting the PvP community as a whole. Now everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and suddenly it’s all good because they found out there’s a market there. They’ve hacked in the PvP but that doesn’t even come close to offering freedom, so they have to sell the byproducts of PvP. We never tried to exploit the M rating, and we never felt there was a need to tease our players with promises of ultra violence or sexist sexual innuendo. For us, it’s all about the features that come from offering full freedom gameplay with accountability. We’ve remained true to our original vision to this day.”

And there’s a lot more to it. Talks about PvE, combat and how much different that is compared to all the other MMO’s, but also more on sandbox games. How in Darkfall the lore will support the gameplay (instead of the other way around), where the players start fresh and will create the stories and shape of the world themself. And I agree very much with his ideas of how a full PvP sandbox world could be, giving players much freedom without many restrictive game-mechanics.

I sometimes wonder if CCP would still have chosen for 4 major NPC Empires that supposedly have a lot of influence on the game-world if they could ‘redo’ EVE, or if they would’ve went for much more player-directed world instead (More 0.0, less Empire). I personally would’ve made the NPC factions a lot less important.

Anyway, the ideas behind Darkfall are pretty much right in my eyes, lets hope the game itself gets it right as well.